Manoj Ranaweera Posts

Thanks to Mark Deakin, we made a decision to start supporting Microsoft (credit also goes to James Akrigg who spent few hours with me early this year. Then the timing wasn’t right for us to act). But returning to Microsoft has not been plain sailing. This post is very much a place to capture how I am navigating through the various hurdles thrown at me. To start with, I seem to have multiple accounts using the same email address. One seem to be called personal, another work and who knows, there could be more. Secondly, there is no real single sign…

I just met a chap from Glasgow and spent two hours talking about the Manchester tech ecosystem. He is keen to get to know others, so here goes a list of players, in no particular order and how the tech ecosystem in Manchester was developed. Before we get going, I have not included tech entrepreneurs and others unless they are involved in the community development. Usually this means running tech entrepreneur events or involved in activities other than simply building their own companies. From 2,300 strong Techcelerate Community Richard Gregory – Head of TechNorth Martin Bryant – Part of…

Today, we are all marketers and salesmen. This is specially true if you work for yourself or a startup. As we all become content generators, getting your target market’s attention to your messages become even more competitive. I have been a fan of Pocket, which allows you to easily save links of importance through a browser plugin. Their latest implementation means that the stories they promote, become the first read before you visit any of other famous news outlets, such as Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter. This suddenly increases the influence Pocket has on content creators and advertisers. Given that…

Almost every company on the planet now has a website to promote their business, whether you a one man band or a multinational company. Once you have a basic website with pages and posts, the job does not simply stop there. You can make your website work really hard for your business. Here is a list of things you might consider: Basic Web Analytics – displays number of visitors, page views, most popular pages, growth of these over different time periods and whole host of parameters. SEO – keywords that allow people to find you. Advanced analytics – identify who the visitors…

Why do you attend Tech Entrerpreneur events in Manchester? What are the regular events one must attend as a tech entrepreneur? Bit of a rant here..so get your coffee/beer first.. For me there are four reasons: Access to finance – find new investors, especially those who are from out of town. Good to meet same folks over and over, but you need those rare individuals you cannot be accessed easily. Plus deal makers. Access to markets – potential users, customers and channel partners as well as those who could introduce others to you. Access to knowledge – learn something new (how…

I’ve been speaking to Paul Rawlings, a Manchester based tech entrepreneur and Techcelerate Member, quite a lot these days to simplify our story and thought of sharing what we came up with. Cover slide – logo, who you are and what your business is in one short sentence. Background – in my case, ran few technology businesses, sold few and had a problem. MVP – Built the MVP and this is what it looks like. Solution – This is how it solves the problem, which is better than how it was solved by others before. Customer development – Found few…

Richard and some of his troops are already doing this.. But let’s get to the starting point. TechNorth is about supporting digital businesses of which tech businesses are a part of. My interest is only on the latter. If you are a tech startup, you hit the pinnacle when you get chosen as a Northern Star (within the TechNorth ecosystem). These companies get the maximum support, and rightly so. What about those left behind? Could there be another two levels of companies, which could get defined support? Yes, we get invited to various events and programmes, but it’s difficult to sum…

I’ve known Richard Gregory for many years [Disclaimer: He was a customer of edocr.com at one point]. When I first heard of his appointment to head of TechNorth, I felt energised. Here is a man well known and respected in Manchester digital community, a sort of people’s champion. However, he was from the digital marketing community and not from the tech entrepreneur community. The only question remaining was that does he understand the pain tech entrepreneurs in the North has to go to get anywhere, especially on raising capital? I just read Richard’s blog post where he shares Objectives…

In 2014, I predicted that the SaaS market will evolve as (in Quora): There will be greater debate on two tier systems, as more and more companies learn to live with on premise (including legacy) and SaaS, adopting a hybrid solutions. SaaS vendors will continue to be pulled in two directions, i.e. best of breed (single product) to multi product (driven by the need for greater revenues, e.g. Box). The middle market will continue to cause confusion due to products that specialise for smaller companies (no sales team), and the rest focusing on larger companies (sales team). The biggest land grab…

I’m no SEO expert. I ended up on SEO Profiler by accident. Not quite true though. I check edocr.com and UnifiedVU standing on Alexa quite often. Once edocr.com reached 14,000th largest website in the world (according to Alexa), and those days, I was quite obsessed in trying to get to 10,000th and beyond. A quick review of UnifiedVU on SEO Profiler revealed the followings: Active backlinks: 553 Unique active backlinks: 22 Links to home page: 540 Link Influence Score (LIS): 4% When I started analysing the 22 unique backlinks, I found out: Creately.com – LIS 97% GrowthHackers.com – LIS 93% Pipedrive…